When my neighbor told me over the fence a month ago the doctor said she had two years to live,

In 1920, my father, 16, was a guest of the British government. He was a prisoner of their forces occupying Ireland at the time, a group called the Black and Tans. One day he and seven o...

Paul’s not a veteran of Vietnam but he goes there in his dreams to watch his brother Tim walk in hazy streams sprayed with Agent Orange before he

I wish he had never come out from behind the stove, that spider I stepped on at 4 a.m. He was a big one bothering no one.

I don’t see her often since she died but when I do it’s eerie over there at dawn or dusk.

After the poetry reading the lights go on and a lady under a big hat rises behind dark sunglasses and asks the poet why

In your mind you hear words snarling all day long but no poem arrives. The words are locked

Virgil comes to group therapy every week in his pick-up truck with his dog, Buster, standing in the bed of the truck. The sessions are held for veterans of Korea and Vietnam. Quite a fe...

Two men tall, one from here and one from there, in raincoats at a bus stop,

When you were a boy in 1948 living on a block of bungalows in Chicago right after WWII you had a red wagon you pulled behind your mother

Each morning I step from the train and march with the others leaving the station. The weatherman’s warned of rain

How many times have I said I’m through teasing myself, through pretending I don’t enjoy the wreath of a woman

It’s a disgusting thing but Paddy Gilhooley, who knew better as a child, had begun farting in church very early in life. He started in grammar school, many decades ago, long before the ...

Underneath the feeder black juncos write hieroglyphics in the snow. Two cardinals arrive In a flash of red. They add

Things are quiet here, a friend wr… in the first email of his long lif… Most mornings I drive to Gillson… sit and read beside the Lake. The waves are a symphony.